About

My name is Darran Jones and www.DalSoft.co.uk is my blog.

I’m a 31 year old that lives in UK with my wife Michelle.  Currently I work for a global professional services firm with over 6000 employees. I lead a team of 4 web developers, responsible for the development of Intranet, Extranet and website solutions.

I’ve been interested in technology since I can remember and like to spend my spare time learning new technologies. In 1986, when I was 7 I wrote my first line of code on a 48K ZX Spectrum. In the early Nineties, I had my first PC a 386.

I have been using the internet since 1996, the first browser I used was IE3, my development career started around then too, writing my first web page in 1997.  1998 – 1999 I developed my first Intranet and website using ASP and Perl back-ends, with HTML and JavaScript front-ends. I’ve used every version of Windows server and client since Windows NT/Windows 3.1, more recently I’ve been getting into Linux (Ubuntu) and open source frameworks.

I’ve been professionally involved in software development for over ten years. This has mainly been web development, but I know my way round a Windows Forms application should the need arise. Predominantly I develop using MS SQL and the .NET framework which I’ve used since beta. I’m now using .NET 4.0, web development wise I’ve settled on ASP.NET (using MVC instead of Web Forms) and jQuery for client side scripting, for testing I mainly use NUnit.

During the last couple of years, I’ve been involved in persuading companies to embrace open source software and Web 2.0 especially RSS and the social intranet (using Confluence).  I’ve also been involved in proving to companies that open source is a viable solution, and that you can get interoperability between platforms working (namely Java and .NET).

I’ve had professional experience in the following:

• .NET framework 1.0 – 4.0, ASP, ASP.NET, C++, C#, Java, PHP, Perl, Python, VB, VB.NET

• CSS, HTML, jQuery, RSS, XML

• CruiseControl.NET, MVC, MSBuild, NAnt, NDoc, NUnit, Subversion,

• MySQL 5.0, Oracle 10g, SQL Server 6.5 – 2008, Windows NT – 2008, Ubuntu

• WordPress, Confluence wiki and Umbraco

www.dalsoft.co.uk has been my home since 2003 (blogging since 2007) to collaborate, share work and ideas.  This is now the fourth generation of my site.

In 2006 I brought a PSP and was annoyed that I couldn’t stream or sync my Windows Media Player music library with my PSP.  Being in a position to do something about it, I set about developing a solution. My first attempts involved basic streaming functionality, by trying to send RSS podcasts over HTTP. Later I realised that I could host the whole library, search and manage music/playlists using a website hosted on my PC, this opened the possibility of streaming my media over the internet too.

I started experimenting with supporting other devices and found this just meant creating a new handler for the target device.  In 2008 I decided to share my little program with others and named the software Apollo, Apollo is now used by 1000′s of people, Find out more about Apollo.

Unfortunately due to starting a demanding job in 2007,  I’ve been unable to commit much time to my website/blog and Apollo. Since 2009, I’ve been trying to spend more time on my site, even if this means blogging on the train to work!

Please contribute to my site by posting comments.